DISTURBING Secrets Hidden in Pompeii

There's a hidden city in Italy where you can still read the last thing that someone graffitied on the wall before the world ended. There was propaganda for a local politician, a joke about someone's love life, even bread left in an oven that never came out. And for almost 1700 years, the city of Pompeii simply didn't exist. Not as a ruin, barely as a legend, it was just simply gone, forgotten, and erased. So completely that farmers planted crops over the rooftops of a buried city and never suspected a thing. Until one day, it was miraculously rediscovered. Because when the world finally found out and dug it back up, they found something inside its walls that the world had never seen before. Bodies, frozen in their final positions, a dog still straining against its chain, a perfect snapshot of one ordinary day almost 2,000 years ago, before a mountain that nobody feared erupted and swallowed an entire town. This is the story of Pompeii. But the thing is, the story is still being written because there is still so much left to be discovered, and we have new evidence that Pompeii actually continued on. So what happened to this Roman city? Who got left behind, and how did it forgotten little town become the most valued, fascinating, and honest window into the ancient world that we've ever had? And what is the city still hiding? Well, today we're going to find out we're walking through the streets of the city that lived three separate lives, a thriving Roman town, a silent grave, and a resurrected time machine. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. What's up people, and welcome back to History Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single week we explored the most interesting, fascinating controversial stories from all time forever and always yes. That is what we do here. This is my personal journey. This is my my my literal life project to try to understand everything that's ever happened. I know, boy, there's a lot of stuff. Literally every day there's new stuff happening, and then there's new stuff to figure out. So I mean, it seems like we're going to be doing this for a long time. So no time to waste, okay? But before we jump into Pompeii and why the city is so fascinating, and also a place that I've been to, by the way, this is a little known fact about me. I've gone to Pompeii, not far away from Napoli, where I went with my parents, when I was like 15, it was crazy. It's the coolest thing ever, and I'll tell you everything that I saw, which is very funny, and shows how people don't really change that much. You look at Pompeii, and you see the screenshot, you're like, "Oh, humans have kind of always been humanin for a while." But I want to say a few things, a couple camp bullets and before again, I want to say thanks to you, dude, or girl, whoever you are. I want to say thanks for tuning in, and just being here. And just listen, and having this conversation with me. Because every time you tune in, and you watch one of the episodes that we do, or you click, and you comment, like any of that stuff, any time you interact with the content, you just tell the algorithm overlords, like, "Hey, Mark and Christos, those are good guys." And they try their best, and they seem like, yeah, we should give them a chance. And you keep the lights on on the 10, you keep the fire burning here at the campsite. Now I just said a name, and you're probably like, "Who's that?" Yeah, Christos. He has a guy to my right. He's the Greek freak. He's the Orthodox legend himself. He's my little window into how the Greek mind works, and he's sitting right next to me. How are you, Christos? Well, I wouldn't they know who I am. No time to waste, okay? I'm assuming there's a lot of people that are like, "Christos, wherever I heard that name before." They're maybe thinking of Jesus Christ, maybe they're thinking of their friend, maybe an exit they have named Christos. Not you. Not me. Not you. Okay. You're a faithful guy. Of course. Only to this one woman ever. That's not the theory over there. Yeah, we're talking about ancient history. You know what I'm talking about? Recent history. Anyway, we're talking about Pompeii. It's a fascinating place. And I'm sure you've probably heard of it. You've probably seen it in books. I think it's one of those things that like, if you were vaguely a history nerd when you were in elementary school, you probably got like a giant picture book. And it was like Pompeii in a day and you got to like flick through it. Not really realizing that you're looking at the literal mass grave of thousands and thousands of people. That's what happened to me. I mean, I was like, probably 10 years old, be like, "Wow, history is amazing." Just looking at like people just frozen in time, screaming their last breaths, just getting consumed by pumice and volcanic rock. It's kind of morbid when you zoom out. But as a kid, you're like, "Isn't history cool." So forget the ruins for a minute. Forget all the ash and the plaster bodies and all that stuff. Because before any of that, Pompeii was a real place. It was an ancient productive town. It kind of like almost a vacation spot. Hey, real quick. Most people who watch this channel aren't subscribed. And when you subscribe, you help the channel grow and you stay in the loop with every new drop, religion camp, history camp, and camp gagnon. Now let's get back to it. It's sat in a region called Campania in the Bay of Naples. One of the most desirable stretches of coastline and basically the whole like ancient Roman world, like rich Romans would literally build like vacation houses there. Like, you know, you'd live in Rome and then you'd be like, "Well, we're going to, you know, we're going to summer in in Campania. We're going to go down to Pompeii. Nothing bad ever happens there." It's kind of like how like billionaires will have like houses and like the Hamptons or like Malibu or something. But Pompeii wasn't even originally a Roman city. The town was old. I mean, centuries old before Rome, like, took it over. It had been shaped by a whole procession of cultures. You had the italic peoples, you know, the italic peoples. They're kind of like little, you know, they kind of stand in a little slant. They spoke a language called Oskan. And then the Greek showed up. Of course, the Greeks, they're all over there. Just put in their little swirly fingers and everything. And then you have the Etruscans, each leaving like a different kind of imprint on this place. And so Pompeii, like most of the Mediterranean region, kind of grows up with like this mix, sort of like, hodgepodge of cultures and trade routes and all these different, you know, kind of like human affects that kind of leave a print on the place. So Rome only took full control of the city around like the first century BC. But like, like, again, it sounds like a long time ago. And it is. But if you look at the scope of everything, I mean, it was controlled by all these different cultures for thousands of years before they showed up. I mean, it's a beautiful coastline. People are going to, if any time someone sees it, they're like, yeah, I'll just live here. This sounds pretty good. So Pompeii backed the wrong side in a war against Rome, so that Rome pulls up. Pompeii gets besieged and was punished by being turned into a colony for Roman military veterans. So a bunch of retired soldiers kind of like move in. And then the whole town became thoroughly Roman on top of everything else that they had already been. So the bay, if you actually go to it, is pretty warm. The sea is full of fish. The soil is like super fertile, which we'll find out is, you know, partially the, you know, the effects of some volcanic activity in the, you know, far past that people didn't really realize. But regardless, you got grapes and olives and grains and everything is growing. It's literally heaven on earth. It's like Eden. Like you're living in, you know, some other part of the Southern Europe and else that you show up at this place were like, oh, there's an ocean full of food and ground that gives us food year round. And the weather's super temperate and awesome. And the coastline is beautiful and we can swim. It's like, yeah, this is exactly why we're on a retire. So the soil, like I mentioned, is extremely volcanic. And that is why it is so fertile. And again, people aren't really making the connection. They're just like, wow, this crowd is amazing. But as we know, volcanic soil generally is pretty fertile. But the mountain that is looming over the bay and basically casting a shadow onto the city of Pompeii is a mountain called Mount Vesuvius. And it had over thousands of years blanketed the whole region in this super mineral rich ash that made the land just like blossoming. Literally, it was a garden. And this mountain was essentially feeding and fertilizing them. And it had been so good for so long that nobody alive even thought that the mountain was a volcano. To them, it was just a mountain green forested. It had, you know, like trees growing out of it and farms going right up on the slopes. It hadn't erupted in a super long time. So everyone was like, oh, wow, this is a beautiful mountain. And the ground was super fertile. Nothing to see here. So by the first century AD, that's all Pompeii was. It was this old multicultural port town, bunch of veterans, maybe like 10 to 12,000 people basically plugged into the largest economy of the world I'd ever seen, which is the Roman Empire at that point. And it wasn't super important. It's not like necessarily super famous. It's just kind of like a really busy kind of port town full of, you know, some wealthy people and some retired veterans. It's almost like Sarasota, Florida. It's kind of what we're talking about. You got old retirees and some rich people and it's kind of just like a nice little town. And it turns out is exactly why it was worth preserving. So let's have a look at what Pompeii was in its heyday, like the height of the boom and of the business. So the streets are paved with these big, flat stones. Again, this is not like dirt roads, this is not the Wild West. These are actual roads with actual like, you could think of almost like ancient asphalt. And the roads are filthy because of how many people are actually traveling down them. If you go, you can see these crosswalks. And the crosswalks are raised so that the Pompeians of the time could walk across the street without having to step through any of like the, you know, horse or donkey, uh, extra mentor, any of the other excrement you might find. And you even have chariot ruts, like literally like the wheels of the chariot's going through the streets that are worn into the stone. The streets are pretty narrow. Again, we're not dealing with cars or anything. We're just dealing with like little chariots and stuff and they're loud and they're crammed with life. And there are bakeries with millstones and ovens, some of which were found with the last batch of bread still inside just kind of showing how quickly this catastrophe happened. And there are, this is going to sound crazy. Bars. Like just a bunch of dive bars, like just like Hey, this is where we go and drink and get hammered my favorite thing is you see like these fast food counters They literally called them a thermopolia. They're these big clay jars sunk into stone countertops And you would basically pull up and you'd be wearing you know your toga or something And you would just grab like a bowl and maybe bring a ball from home And you'd take a ladle and you'd scoop up a bunch of hot stew and maybe a cup of wine And you didn't have to go home to cook because maybe we were like a sailor coming into town You're like, man, I'm so hungry. You pop into a little restaurant have some stew later that night You go to a bar and then literally it's a regular city It feels like any place you could go today. There's like places you can do laundry. There's Workshop so you can build stuff. There's brothels. There's temples to dozens of different gods There's public baths where the whole city came to kind of like sweat and gossip and do business And then of course there's an amphitheater one of the oldest stone amphitheaters We know of anywhere in the Roman world the pumpans loved their games and their plays so much They love the games so much specifically that in I think 59 AD a riot broke out at the arena between locals and visitors from a neighboring town And he got so out of hand that literally the Emperor Nero Banned Pompe from holding games for 10 years because he was afraid of like violent You know like like Ultras basically battling each other and killing each other And he didn't want to have like some type of like rebellion caused and you know the southern part of his Roman Empire pretty crazy Now you can see like Italian sports culture is like Rooted in this. It's like yeah the Pompeians and like the the southern Napolians were like hey, we're not we're not gonna get embarrassed in our home court And so they would like fight each other And we know this because there's literally a fresco of the riot painted on a wall And it literally made its way into Roman histories by other later Roman historians that wrote about it So this little town was making national headlines for starting a sports brawl It's like the Philly of of the ancient world. They're just like crazy sports fans like to drink and have brothels And it just have a good time, you know what I'm saying And uh the thing that brings Pompeii most vividly back into life isn't necessarily the buildings or how modern everything is the thing that I even noticed when I went there as a kid is the graffiti If you go there even to this day like we went and the tour guide was like yeah, you know We're gonna go down this alleyway and there's there's a lot of graffiti on the walls like the architecture is beautiful and the buildings are amazing But it has been vandalized and I was expecting to show up and see like you know like some guy tagging it with spray paint That's not what I saw it's like etchings and scratches and like murals that were painted literally in like one Like BC like it's crazy like how old these actual pieces of graffiti are and it's really interesting to see the ancient world's graffiti Because most of what we get from the ancient world what survives is what historians write down or it's what you know like the Emperors or the dictators or the statesman would write down from their scribes. It was all very like proper But what we see in the graffiti is what the actual average person was thinking about and a lot of it is Not very dignified and it kind of shows like yeah dudes have always kind of been dudes like you'll see like election ads like Hey vote for Steve he makes good bread and then there's bar tabs and there's like insults and there's People bragging about who they slept with someone else declaring like an undying love like you know like oh What's a good uh Greek woman name Maria oh Maria like never forget me da da da da There's like a tired line scratch near a doorway that even translates to something like I'm amazed wall that you haven't collapsed under the weight of so many writers nonsense So it's literally people commenting about the commentary 2000 years ago someone in this town was already sick of graffiti and complaining about it like Sun old guy being like man. It's a shame what they did to you poor wall This is the reversal at the heart of everything This is what reminds us and shows us that Pompeii was alive and human and not human in like the old sense where like we think of Ancient Romans is like walking around and Debating about the politics and being very stately like no, it's just regular dudes like right and random stuff There's a lot of penis graffiti as well not to be crude here on history camp I know we try to keep it pretty clean, but there's phallic graffiti all over the place And there's actually a whole like phallic museum we can talk about that a little later But the grand Roman text that we inherit were like I said written by senators and emperors And we never get to see the actual working class kind of affect like the baker or the barmaid or like the kid talking about his crush And so every bit of that Is living in the shadow of a mountain that was without any of them even knowing Coming close to some type of ultimate destruction Now as you probably know by this point Pompeii gets destroyed and completely covered by volcanic ash But 17 years before that day the ground actually gave Pompeii and its citizens a warning They just didn't really understand it So 62 AD there's a powerful earthquake that hit the region and did pretty serious damage to Pompeii So temples cracked and like some of the buildings came down It was bad enough that they were still rebuilding a lot of it almost two decades later So when Mount Vesuvius aka volcano Vesuvius finally erupted The city is like full of scaffolding and like half finished repairs and construction that had been Dragging on for years, which is just another funny point to show how Modern the ancient world was like renovations going over time and over budget is just A human error. That is just what it means to be human. Hey, you want to redo your bathroom Add it add a year and add 10 grand because it's gonna be longer and more expensive than you think And people haven't dealing with this ever since the Pompeii So to us looking back this earthquake is pretty obvious. It's like hey There's some type of seismic activity. There's some type of fault line going on But for them they didn't really know they didn't have the same understanding of you know seismic geography that we understand But Vesuvius was waking up and the tremors were the pressure building up deep underground underneath this mountain and ultimately Under Pompeii and that understanding is obvious you know to us now especially because we know how the story ends And we've learned how to read the signs over years sort of in part because of what happened at Pompeii But so the people living there the earthquake was just an earthquake They happen sometimes they happen all throughout Italy and you just kind of you know rebuild move on and honestly They probably didn't know what a volcano necessarily was Again the time there's no science of volcanoogy like there was no cultural memory of Vesuvius in particular erupting Because it hadn't done so in a really really long time like the last major eruption of Vesuvius was centuries ago before anyone alive at that time was born and I think partially because of the shifting of the region a lot of the memory and sort of the history that was written down Might not have been passed on to the new people that took over the land. So for them the mountain was just a farm And the idea that it would open up and pour fire and ash and magma onto the coast It wasn't even a fear that they just dismissed it just wasn't even on their radar So in the years and months before the eruption the warnings got louder There were more tremors and the springs and the wells that they were sort of living off of were kind of drying up The livestock interestingly we're starting to behave like pretty strangely according to some later accounts Every one of these things was an alarm bell and every one of them was just completely incomprehensible that there was some other type of threat lumen because the people hearing them had no framework that turned like hey The ground is shaking again into this is a mountain that's literally going to kill all of us We have one man to thank for the fact that we know any of this and his name is Pliny Specifically Pliny the younger he is a well-connected young roman who happened to be staying across the bay at a naval base called mycena And he was there basically when all of this happened years later He wrote two letters describing what he saw and they are the only detailed eyewitness accounts of the eruption that survived from anyone who was actually there But we have to use Pliny very carefully because he wasn't in Pompeii He was watching from across the water safe Miles away and he gave us the scale and like just the how terrifying the actual size of this plume was But he can't tell us what it was like being on the streets and in the bakery and just the actual emotional Damage that happened when the sky literally just started falling and for that we don't have words as evidence But we have bodies So let's go to 79 AD and I want to just stop right here before we go on because it's a small mystery that historians are still trying to figure out For centuries everyone thought that they knew the date they were like ah august 24th 79 AD and it came straight from Pliny's letters right like Pliny wrote about it and he put this date So case closed except the case is actually not closed because when archaeologists actually dig they keep finding things that don't Necessarily fit with that specific date. They find carbonized pomegranates and walnuts and chestnuts which are autumn fruits Not summer fruits. So why if the date is august are we finding things that show up into September and October? There are jars of newly pressed wine suggesting that the grape harvest had already happened which typically happens a little bit later people are wearing heavier clothing Like things that you would wear typically in the autumn and winter months and in 2018 When the wall of a house that was being renovated someone found a line of charcoal graffiti dated to October 17th Which is interesting, but if it's October 17th of 79 AD that date Shouldn't exist the whole city would already be gone by august so some experts now think that the eruption actually came in autumn of 79 Not in the summer and others point out that The fruit maybe was preserved, the coins are pretty ambiguous and Pliny's manuscripts still say August So it's just an interesting detail that this debate is still ongoing and even with history where we have a First person eyewitness account. There's still some room for error when it comes to how dating and the actual Chronology of things really goes, but for now we're just gonna say for certain it was 79 AD and it didn't happen the way that a lot of Movies or recreations will show it. There's no wall of lava that just comes down and consumes everything There's no single instant what happened to Pompey unfolded over the better part of like half of a day in stages and Each stage is worse than the last. So from all the records that scholars and real historians can find the explosion begins around midday And again a lot of people imagine that there's a big wall of magma that comes down and just sweeps the whole city up It's not really what happens There's just an explosion like not a regular explosion a nuclear bomb that happens just five miles away and it blasts this column of Gas and ash and pumice pumice is like they're kind of like these light little like volcanic stones So you can you can think of it like you can almost like scoop up a handful of them and they're pretty light But when you pile on you know literally Feet of them they can crush you and they go 20 miles straight up into the sky Higher than you would see like a jet flying to this day. So plenty the historian we're talking about He's sitting across the bay and he said it literally looked like a tree a massive trunk rising up and then spreading out at the top with branches And he didn't have a word for what he was seeing He just used a description that he was familiar with and then it all started to fall not lava but rock and like I said pumice is like this light porous rock and it starts raining down on Pompeii literally by the tons and at first It was like a strange kind of like novelty, right like it started to fall and it's not killing you It's just kind of like almost like a light hail almost and it's kind of like pelting you and you know It starts to build up and all of a sudden the the ground you're looking at is now covered in like these little rocks and then it's ankle deep And then it's knee deep and then it's piling up against doors and pressing on roofs an hour after hour Roves start to collapse under the weight and anyone who decided to shelter inside to get away from the falling rock is now I was sudden crushed by the weight of all the rocks stacked on top of them and then There's a terrible calculation that the people of Pompeii had to make in real time So they're just sitting there having a regular day all of a sudden nuclear bomb goes off huge blast massive tree 20 miles into the sky little rocks start falling on them and now the whole sky is darkened with this ash So all of a sudden in the middle of the day it goes to nighttime and they think do I run out into an open space where These rocks are like hammering me and I can't really see where I'm going And I don't really know which way is safe and I don't even really understand what's going on or do I just Stay inside light a candle and live inside my roof and you know protect myself that way Well many of them ran and we know that they ran because we have strong evidence that most of Pompeii actually got out But some of them stayed and for the ones who stayed and for the ones who maybe ran too late There is still another thing coming a even worse thing and it hadn't even started yet So of course the falling rock over enough time could kill you But it was pretty slow and it was survivable if you were running fast enough But the next thing that came was not after hours of this eruption and this ongoing explosion the towering column of ash and Gas above the mountain became too heavy to hold itself up and as a result it just collapsed And so instead of the blasting going upward it came down the slopes of the Suvius and all of a sudden You had a churning avalanche of super-heated gas and ash and rock now moving at the speed of a hurricane And it's hugging the ground and if you get too close it is hot enough to kill you instantly and In the modern day scientists will call this pyroclastic surges and they are the deadliest thing that a volcano can do Hey guys, we're gonna take a break really quick because I got to tell you something if you know me You know I'm obsessed with finding ways to cheat biology without accidentally ruining my biology and for a long time I associated putting a pouch in with being focused and energized and like ready to attack the day But the thing is nicotine is a vasoconstrictor which means it literally narrows your blood vessels and restricts oxygen delivery to your muscles So I'm taking something because I think it's helping me when I'm working out and it's helping me lock in Meanwhile my blood vessels are essentially closing the gates while my muscles are begging for supplies So you're trying to get this awesome pump, but your body is like I'm just gonna elevate your blood pressure and give you some anxiety And that's why I switched to ultra pouches. I love ultra ultra ultra is a 100% nicotine-free pouch with zero nicotine and zero caffeine It gives me that like pouch ritual that I like and also a really smooth energy And just it's really locked in focus and it's so much better when I'm working out It makes me feel great at the gym. They use new tropics and adapt to jeans And I usually feel it start within like a few minutes and I throw one in before I go to the gym before a podcast I have one in right now and it sharpens me up without making me feel like I'm like anxious or like I'm jittery and when I'm fasting You're trying to clean up my diet. It really helps quiet just the food noise and the cravings that I have It's amazing you get all the focus you get all the energy you still get the pouch experience But again, there's zero nicotine and zero caffeine so I'm not dealing with the same wired feeling or like the crash that I get from caffeine My favorite flavor is blue raspberry. I got the watermelon right here because I already finished the blue raspberry Ultra is the ultimate guilt-free pouch delivering instant focus and mental clarity without nicotine and caffeine and I've great news If you are listening to this program right now when you use the code camp you will get 15% off when you go to take Ultra dot com that is take ultra dot com use the code camp for 15% off and after you purchase They're gonna ask where you heard about them tell them that Mark increased those from the campsite sent you Do you have a friend that buys gold instead of crypto because he doesn't trust the internet that's a power move You got a buddy that has like a backup generator and a bunch of canned food and somehow knows that a blackout's coming before the Power company does that's a power move and do you have a friend that hired Morgan and Morgan will guess what that's a power move Yep, Morgan and Morgan is America's largest injury law from with over a hundred offices nationwide and over a thousand lawyers They've recovered over thirty billion dollars for more than five hundred thousand clients in Florida They secured a 644 million dollar verdict after the defense argued that the victim and his wife should get nothing That is a power move So if you are ever injured you can check out Morgan Morgan and their fee is free unless they win go to for the people dot com slash Gagnon or dial pound law that's pound five two nine from your cell phone That is for the people dot com slash gagnon. This is a paid advertisement The first surge actually goes through another town a town on the other side of the mountain called Herculineum and the heat there was so extreme that it did unspeakable things to any human being that was unfortunate enough to get caught in the surge But then the surges came for Pompeii and by the time they arrived the city had already been battered for hours and was now buried under feet of pumice and people were still there sheltering in cellars or huddled in back rooms or some of them even just trapped under debris or just Too slow to escape you can think of elderly or the very young completely confused and they were overtaken by a wave of gas and of ash that Filled every street in every doorway and most tragically every long that happened to breathe it in and this is the moment that the plaster casts that we actually see in the modern day capture Not a peaceful city going to sleep a city in its final chaotic terrifying hour and the thing is The ash and the pumice doesn't stop it keeps on falling and falling and falling long after the last person died I mean for Suvius kept bearing the town layer on layer until Pompeii was completely gone like literally covered beneath like 20 feet of volcanic material the tops of the tallest tallest buildings of the town were completely covered the streets were vanished hours ago and the whole city was just packed and hidden As if it never existed at all and when it was over the sky finally cleared and someone standing on the shore of the Bay of Naples Would have looked toward where a busy city full of 10,000 people had stood that morning going about their normal day and they would see nothing Except just a gray smoking plane Now Pompeii did not become a famous ruin no one at the time went there and built a monument still and made it a place of pilgrimage I mean the Romans knew that a disaster had occurred like the Emperor Titus had even sent some type of relief But the city itself was just gone most of the relief that was sent was to help the survivors and the people that were the refugees and those that were Actually able to escape but as time went on centuries kind of rolled over the top Pompeii just like the ash and Rome rose higher than ever and then ultimately Rome fell and the empires kind of came and went and Pieces of the Roman Empire got broken off and then reintegrated and new people kind of set up farms on this big sort of You know newly growing plane and they started planting crops on the ground and they never really knew that 18 feet beneath them There were bakeries with bread still in the ovens and people still in these sellers Clutching each other in their final moments and the name of Pompeii just kind of faded And the location kind of blurred and it sort of became a legend that people kind of talked about like oh, yeah There was a place here in the volcano cave and it covered it all up, but That's kind of all it was just sort of a rumor that was kind of lost in the dirt. And for roughly 1600 years, one of the richest archaeological sites in all of human history was just silent, just unknown under this farmland in Southern Italy. It's an interesting thing to look at in hindsight, because in the modern day, we have an understanding of archaeology or preserving history, but for the Romans at the time, there was nothing really to preserve. I mean, some wealthy people actually went back and started to dig for their specific valuables. They went to the area maybe where their house was and they dug into it because they had gold or jewels or gems hidden underneath. But outside of taking care of the refugees and the actual people that survived and escaped and going back and collecting some of the valuable remnants, the land wasn't really something to excavate. I mean, think about it. It's tons and tons, literally 20 feet deep of just rock and ash, that it wasn't really worth trying to excavate it and rebuild the city. They didn't have a concept of that. So they kind of just left it and people were aware that something happened there and there was a tragedy and life just kind of went on. And that's how it was for hundreds of years and then slowly it started to emerge. And the first real breakthrough of the site came actually in the 1700s. It wasn't until 1748 when the bourbon kings ruling Naples at the time started digging. But we should be clear about what early archaeology actually was. It wasn't archaeology in the way that we think of it. It was treasure hunting. You see, the people that were digging were after beautiful things. They wanted to find statues and frescoes and marble and anything that could decorate a royal palace or a nobleman's collection. Again, think about it at that time. I mean, 1700 years ago, this is ancient history to them. And if some guy is able to dig up stuff and sell it to a noble, he can make a lot of money. And they were aware that there was a rumor, that there was a place that was covered up. And so they started to tunnel in and rip out what was valuable and really just kind of destroyed everything else around it, like the context and the ordinary objects, the little clay pot that has food in it, the delicate record of daily life, it wasn't worth anything. So they were kind of mining Pompeii for loot. And it wasn't even confirmed to be Pompeii until 1763 when they finally dug up an inscription and found the name of the town. But the actual turning point here, the moment that Pompeii went from kind of just being a treasure hunter's dream to actually being a record came a century later. When one guy, Giuseppe Fiorelli, who actually took the excavations seriously in 1860. Fiorelli was really a modern thinker. He was a different kind of person. He didn't want treasure. He wanted to understand. So he divided the city into numbered zones and insisted on recording exactly where every object was found and dug from the top down instead of just tunneling in like a looter or a treasure hunter. And he really looked at Pompeii as evidence and kind of turned this treasure hunting idea into a science. And then Fiorelli suddenly noticed something that changed everything. As his team started to dig through this, at this point, hardened ash, they kept on hitting empty pockets, like these weird voids, these hollow spaces in this solid rock. And Fiorelli, and this is a real flash of genius, he realized in that instance what these hollows were. When the surges buried the people of Pompeii, the ash had packed tightly around their bodies and then hardened. And over the centuries, the bodies inside just decayed away into nothing, but the ash held the shape. So each hollow was a perfect mold of a human being in the exact position that they were in when they died, frozen in that kind of negative space. Almost as like a fossil for 1800 years at this point. So in 1863, when Fiorelli's team found one of these voids, they stopped. They poured liquid plaster inside of it and they let it harden. And then they carefully kind of chipped away the surrounding rock and they found the shape of a real human being terrified and frozen in time. It was the exact outward form of a human being on that fateful day in '79 AD. Literally everything, like the fold of their clothing, the way that their limbs were laying, a hand raised to the face, trying to find any extra oxygen that they could breathe in. Just a body curled around another smaller one. Even a dog still twisted against the chain that kept it from running away. These are not sculptures that someone made. These are the shapes of real individual terrified people that were left in ash in the last seconds of their lives. And Fiorelli, in his genius and in his forward thinking, was able to fill them back in. And now we have to be clear about what these casts are. They are not petrified bodies in the way that some people will call them. They are plaster poured into a hollow. And they are usually still real human bones inside of them. You can think when a body decays, it's just the bones that are left. So these casts are actually two things. They are the single most powerful window into that day to really feel the tangible horror and to actually have empathy with people that lived almost 2,000 years ago. And they are also the actual remains of a real human being who died in terror, now being displayed behind glass for millions of tourists a year with their actual bones, many of which still cast in this plaster. And the archaeological park of Pompey holds the remains of more than 1,000 victims and around 100 of these different casts. And it's not a prop, like that's a Tuesday afternoon in the city's life at the worst possible, most awful catastrophic moment. And it captures the shape in plaster of that memory. Now, here's a weird thing about those casts for 150 years. We thought we kind of knew who these people were. But it turns out these scholars were wrong because in 2024, a team of scientists did something that fear really could have never dreamed of. They went into the cast, into like the real fragmented bones still trapped inside the plaster and they pulled something out. They pulled out DNA. Yeah, they really went into the bones and found any DNA that was still there. And what's interesting is that the DNA didn't necessarily match the stories. So you take the most famous group of all, right? There's an adult with a child on their lap wearing a delicate gold bracelet. And for over a century, the label was obvious. Okay, this is a mother holding her child in the last seconds of both of their lives. It's in postcards, it's on textbooks. And it's very sad and very beautiful. It's almost like a modern version of the pietta, you know? Like a mother in English holding her child or is there both about to die? But the DNA came back. And what's interesting is that the mother isn't a mother at all, it was a man. It was an adult male. And it wasn't even related to the child that he was holding. Another pair locked in what looked like this final embrace. It was long described as two sisters or maybe a mother and a daughter, but two women, there were in each other's arms, holding each other in their final moments. But at least one of these people in the cast were male. Each one of these stories, we kind of just made up, like not maliciously, but just, you know, researchers and historians, they looked at the shape of the ash and they kind of interpreted it through their own modern lens and they kind of took, you know, general kind of measuring of the bone lengths. And they were like, yeah, these are women, right? These are a mom and, you know, holding their child, who else is gonna hold a child at the end of times, right? This is gonna obviously be the mom or, you know, these two people embracing each other, they're probably both women, they're kind of sisters. Like we projected our own world backwards, 1800 years onto people who couldn't correct us. What's fascinating is that the DNA didn't just stop there, it also revealed where these people came from, like originally, like their ethnicity. And the answer is everywhere. I mean, the people of Pompeii were largely descended from immigrants from the Eastern Mediterranean. It wasn't some homogenous little Italian town full of Pompeians that were born and raised their whole lives. It was, it was a genetic crossroads of the entire Roman world, exactly like the living, mixed, cosmopolitan port that we walked through at the start of this story. And in many ways, kind of like any metropolis to this day. So the cast turned out to be haunting for many reasons. It's not just that we can see these people and how they died, but it's also that we've been kind of telling their stories wrong the whole time. And we're only now finally getting to the point where we know who they really were. And another interesting part, roughly a third of the city is still buried right now. Under the litter, the same ash that fell on that same day in 79 AD and archaeologists are deliberately not in a hurry to dig it up because the modern understanding is that excavation can also be destruction. Now, why is that? The whole point of excavation is to preserve it. How is it also destruction? Well, right now, the parts of Pompeii that are still covered by this ash are preserved. They're frozen in time and they're not going to decay any further. And the moment you just expose Pompeii to sun and rain and air, it'll start to decay in a way that it never did while it was sealed. So they're leaving a lot of it underground on purpose and protecting it and waiting for future tools and future minds to figure out how we can actually excavate it but continue to preserve it. So at this point, Pompeii is kind of being saved for a technology that doesn't exist yet. But the small amounts of digging that does happen continue to rewrite the story every single year. And the discoveries that keep coming out of Pompeii, even in just the last few years have been extraordinary. So for example, there is a region called Regio 9 and archaeologists recently uncovered that there's an entire grand house that they literally nicknamed the House of the Asos and inside it is a banquet hall with a nearly life-sized painting running across three entire walls and it shows a wild procession for the god of wine. Literally, it shows this procession for Dionysus And there are-- Dancers and hunters and musicians that are all in this like mid-Frenzy and it's only the second painting ever found in the entire city That's like it. They uncovered a private bath complex in the same house too like a hot Bath with like warm and cold rooms and it's big enough for 30 guests to go in and soak before a feast and The craziest part they find laundry and they find a bakery with a fresco of something that looks kind of like pizza Like it's crazy. They find like this fresco that shows like a flatbread with like toppings 2000 year literally the Italians have been on pizza for so long. It's hard even wrapped your mind around it like In the final days of Pompeii there was one guy that was like mixing a pizza Oh mama me and all the ash has found it's like it's crazy because it sounds so modern But this is 2000 years ago and there's also elements that are a bit darker as well There's a room in the same bakery with no view of the outside. There's tiny windows that are kind of barred with iron and grooves that are worn into the stone in a circle were enslaved people and Animals with blindfolds were forced to walk in an endless loop grinding grain hour after hour And they had no way to escape the director of Pompeii called it maybe the most shocking face of ancient slavery literally a prison Built into a bakery kind of hiding in plain sight behind a house decorated with gorgeous frescoes that contrasts kind of the Beauty and the brutality separated by just a single wall and it might be the truest thing that Pompeii has ever shown us about the ancient world But the most incredible thing being pulled out of the ground right now isn't Pompeii It's the city that I mentioned a little bit earlier called Herculineum And it's the town on the other side of the mountain basically the other Pompeii It was the one that was hit first by the blast of that, you know, super heated gas Well, it actually did something horrifying and miraculous at the same time So in one building on the other side of the mountain They found a man who had died in his bed and when they examined his school They found dark glassy shards inside of it like shiny black Kind of like obsidian pieces of stone and it's not what you think It was his brain the heat had been so extreme and it cooled so fast that it literally turned the tissue in his brain Into glass It's maybe the only time that we've ever found a human being anywhere on earth with this type of condition And to give you a sense of the force that we're talking about the temperature needed to do that is well over 100 degrees Celsius. I mean multiple hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit now some scientists still debate whether that's truly brain tissue that was kind of turn into trinitite basically But if it is it's the single most extreme thing that Vesuvius maybe left behind And that same heat that maybe turned a brain literally into glass did another thing in Herculanium It hit a library this entire private library with hundreds and hundreds of papyrus scrolls You could walk up and down the halls of this library and pull out letters from statesmen or historical records from scribes that wrote down that wrote down maybe some ancient history from thousands of years ago But it got carbonized in a second It turned basically all these scrolls into just lumps of charcoal And they're so fragile that for 250 years anyone who tried to unroll these lumps of charcoal would just Have it destroy in their hands and turn it to black dust as they were looking at it The only surviving library from the ancient world is just completely unreadable And it's locked in a room full of books that no one can ever open Until now because in the last few years There's a project called Vesuvius Challenge that started scanning these charred scrolls and with particle accelerators And literally artificial intelligence being let loose on the images. They're now training it to find Like the remnants of ancient ink on this carbonized paper and to literally unroll the scrolls virtually without ever having to touch them Or break them down and it's going to sound crazy But it's working Teams have already started pulling readable Greek text out of the scrolls that hadn't been opened in 2000 years And in 2026 literally this year they recovered entire titles and authors that no one has ever read before And not only that we didn't even know they existed some of the works include a lost work of philosophy that had been sitting sealed and silent Since the day that the mountain blew I mean think about what that means somewhere in the ash there may be Lost plays or history or technology or philosophy words that no human being has ever read or experienced Before the eruption and right now we are developing the tools to actually read them And that's kind of the gift of this whole place and it's kind of the strange uncomfortable dichotomy Every amazing thing that we know about Rome and the Roman Empire is Like the history of the winners It's the generals and the senators and the Caesar Augustus and the Julius Caesar and all these people that we cover Like all the time we cover a lot even on history camp But Pompeii is the only place that really preserved everybody All at the same time. It's not divided by class It's just all broken down frozen into a single moment you have the elite and the statesmen and the wealthy and the enslaved You have the banker and the banquet and you have the person actually doing the work and it didn't curate what to remember It's not history written by the winners It just took everything exactly as it was and just handed it forward and to this day we are still uncovering that mysterious gift So let's just kind of summarize and go back to the very beginning of the story You have a city frozen in a single moment of time with people trapped forever in horror But that's only part of it because in the last few years one researcher decided to ask a question that no one had ever really asked before What if not everyone died and he took names that were unique to Pompeii real family names chiseled on the stones And he went looking for them in the surrounding towns after the year of 79 AD and he found them Over and over he discovered Pompeii and families turning up alive and in nearby cities like Naples and Austria And Pio Tiole and they're basically rebuilding their lives elsewhere in the years after the disaster There's a family of fish sauce merchants who fled literally like thing of just like a regular kind of like middle-class family That makes fish sauce and they sell it to sailors and different merchants that come around And they set up their business again in a new city and they named their first child that was born there The man from puttiole like literally to kind of like plant a flag like hey We're living in Pompeii. We almost got killed now. We escaped and we're here and this is who we are now There are records of women who lost their husbands in Pompeii But they escaped and in one case a woman escaped with her baby daughter and made it to a port city and remarried There are entire extended families who got out together and married into each other and prospered And it's crazy because the evidence of this was kind of hiding in plain sight the whole time Like you just had to go through and find the names of the people in the city and search the records of the surrounding cities for the same names Like the stables at Pompeii were found empty like the carts and the horses almost all of them were gone The docks were missing ships the strong boxes were cleaned out of money and jewelry There's not a city that was caught completely by surprise It wasn't like literally in one second the whole thing froze Like it was a city that for hours many of them saw the death coming and the ones that were Free or brave enough for just happen to make the right decision ran before the worst of it hit and thousands of them made it and they lived lives that Maybe didn't make it into a single history book until the modern era and the ash didn't preserve the emperors and the victories It just preserved normal people the bread the graffiti the Bard window and the raised hands over the mouth had buried this whole ordinary city So completely that for 16th centuries Humans just kind of forgot that it was really there and in bearing it it saved it more perfectly And in a more honest and complete way than maybe any monument that any king ever built and that lays in gentlemen Is the beautiful and mysterious story of Pompeii So far because remember there's still a lot more that is being uncovered There's still a third of it that is still underneath the ground and as we've seen there might still be more about Pompeii And the ancient world surviving in places that we haven't even thought to look yet And maybe technology is still being developed to uncover all of it and the story is still to this day continuing to be told Now actually lasian gelman that is the brief and abridged history of the city of Pompeii I mean it is a fascinating place and truly one of my favorite places in the world if you ever get The chance of the opportunity to go on a vacation to Italy I cannot recommend going to Pompeii enough if you were even remotely interested in history You could spend multiple days there my hot take like you go to naples you enjoy naples There's all sorts of beautiful stuff in naples. You know you got to hang with the southern Italians which You know it's its own thing But then you go to Pompeii and you're like oh this is amazing It's like truly the best thing ever and I will say a hot take naples has maybe my favorite food in all of Italy I know the northern Italians like to kind of like bag on the southern Italians. I get it right There's like that that old joke where like the northern Italians need the southern Italians and vice versa Why the southern Italians need the northern Italians because you need bankers and lawyers and stuff like that And the northern Italians need southern Italians because they need barbers It's kind of a funny joke, but it does in a ways kind of summarize the relationship between the two All that to say Pompeii is a gem and you should absolutely go now there is an element about this that I sort of debated that we should talk about But I've got it pulled up if you want it Oh, are you already thinking what I'm thinking? I mean you can't talk about the crystallized people without Oh, yeah, this guy Which I think that, I think this is just a bad moment, okay? People think these grabbing us, we should deal. He could be scratching. He could be itching 'cause maybe it's hot, maybe he's burning. Maybe the rock is falling on him and he's like trying to cover his piece, like he's standing in the wall against a Andreas Pirdo. You do hear so many stories though of people being on an airplane, that's about a fall and being like, we got 37 seconds here. I only need 20. Exactly. I don't think that's what's going on, but I mean, it is sort of fun. I wonder when they got this mold, if they were like, "Ah, interesting." I wonder if the researchers kind of looked each other like, "He's not, he's not, no, is it no, right?" No. The one I was going to talk about, and again, if you're watching this with your kids, I know that sometimes the younger folks watch this, there is a phallus museum. If you want to skip this part, go ahead, you can jump three minutes, but there is a collection in Pompeii. It's actually technically in Naples, but it contains 250 erotic objects, most excavated from Pompeii and Herculaneum, and they are phallus-shaped amulets and lamps and frescoes from brothels and fertility symbols, and some extremely explicit sculptures. The collection was considered so scandalous that after excavation, the authorities repeatedly locked it away from the public, and they were like, "Oh, mama, me, what kind to show other people? The penis. This is a tool to crazy." And then in 2000, they were like, "All right, fine, we'll open it." I mean, it's covered in phallic imagery. There's literally the fresco of Priapis in the house of the Vetti. Can you pull it up? This is specifically the, this is the Priapis, P-R-I-A-P-U-S in the house of the Vetti, where the fertility god is literally weighing his enormous junk against a bag of money. I mean, look at this. Oh, this is a multicultural city. They're not lying about Italian, so that's what I'm saying, dude, there's a horse people. Good galley. I mean, I know they said the horse were out of the stable, but they left one on a fresco. I mean, look at this guy. I mean, so technically, this is supposed to be like a fertility god, and there's a symbol of fertility and prosperity and abundance, and it's not just simply a sexually graphic, but it is hilarious. Not only this image, there are other images, like apparently, this is what the guide told me, is that they had a different relationship with phallic graffiti, and that the way we see it, we kind of lived through a western kind of Christianized lens, where we see sexual sort of arts as graphic or for a mature audience, so to speak. He claimed, and again, history is kind of just like piecing together, like context clues and making the best story we can. The way that they saw it, like nudity was not something that they were as ashamed of. They would have public bath houses, where the whole town would basically just bathed together. I don't know if they were even gender specific at this time. I think it was just like everyone just showed up and like got naked and bathed, and they saw the literally the phallus is almost like a good luck little talisman. It was kind of like an anti-evil eye thing or like a fertility thing, or like sometimes even a joke or like a declaration of prosperity. It was just kind of like done as like a funny thing. Maybe teenage boys are actually the ancient Romans of the modern day, because when I was drawn, you know, willies in like my math book, I wasn't doing it to be like grotesque. I was just doing it because it was like funny, but it just was inherently grotesque. No, I mean, you put veins on it, but you just do it for fun. Like you're just like trying to like shorten curlies. I mean, you're trying to be silly, you know, you're not trying to like do some type of like, uh, you're trying to someone get that textbook in two years from now and be like, uh, gagging on got me. Yeah, exactly. You want them to look at and be like, that's good detail. You got me. I'm just saying, maybe that's what they were doing sometimes. I don't know. I find this to be fascinating. And uh, if you ever get the chance truly, put that on the list. You should absolutely go. Have you ever been? No, I'm not far from Athens. Yeah, you're already over there. It's like, go ahead, two hour flight and $400. I'm just saying it is worth it. Yeah, for sure. To see a piece of history that never has been there forever. I want to go. I know seriousness. Put it on the list. I get it's like a little out of the way. Like a lot of people that go to Italy, they go to Rome. And they're like, I'm going to spend a week in Rome. Go south. Go to Naples. Enjoy the real pizza of the Southern Italians. The Northern Italians, they're basically German, they're basically Swiss. There's even a Southern Italy. I'm actually a big Southern Italy guy. What food did you recommend? Flap bread with toppings. All of it. 2,000 euro. Try to find an ancient piece of bread that's in an oven. You can have a 2,000 euro piece of bread. And it probably still fire. That's how good the Italians are at cooking. Okay. Another interesting fun history fact. At the time when they were doing these flatbreads with toppings, I know we kind of called it pizza. It technically wasn't pizza. You want to know why? They didn't have tomatoes. And Italy? No. You can fact check me on this. I'm almost certain tomatoes come from America. And the Italians didn't actually get access to tomatoes until around like 1500. Isn't that crazy? It is crazy because they've used the crap out of them. I mean, good golly. They've gone crazy on the tomatoes. And I'm almost positive. And again, I need a fact check here because I don't want to lead our whole audience to stray. The whole point of the show is that people got smarter and less dumb. But I'm pretty sure tomatoes are an American thing that we're being farmed by the Indigenous Americans of America and Columbus and the rest of the boys go down. They have a haphazard little interaction with the natives. And part of it is that they get tomatoes back. I think that's true. Tomatoes came from America and ancient Italy did not have them. What a world, right? The chicken palms, the pasta, the spaghetti. And now people make the claim, which I think is actually fallacious, not pun intended. But they'll make the claim that noodles came from Marco Polo going to China. Right. I actually don't think that's true. And I'm almost positive that the Italians like figured out pasta and noodles kind of independently from the Chinese, but they both are sort of on the same noodle wave. Google's AI interview says a likely originated in China over 4,000 years ago. But is it because Marco Polo went over there? Now, according to a little Google search for me, it says, no, it is a persistent myth that Marco Polo introduced pasta intently. Pasta was already being made in Italy before Marco Polo returned from Asia around 1295. One particularly strong piece of evidence is that the Arab Geographer Al Idrissi wrote in 1154 about how a town in Sicily was producing and exporting large quantities of dried stringy things that was basically pasta that he called it three. Yeah, about 140 years before Marco Polo ever came. So again, I think again, the Chinese were developing noodles. The Italians were developing pasta. And Marco Polo probably went over there and they were like, have some noodles and he was like, bro, we already got noodles at home. Crazy, right? Yeah. But all that to say, God bless the Italians. I'd riva danxi, bon giorno. God bless the good Catholics that live in southern Italy to this day. The Sicilians, I don't care what people say about you. I'm sorry for how America treated you guys when you came over. All right. That's one thing that I wish I could take it back. It wasn't nice. And I had nothing to do with it. All right. I was up in Canada as a Catholic in Canada, again, persecuted by the English over the Protestants. Now, I just want to say, if you know anything about the story or you've done more research on Pompeii than I have, again, I'm not a historian. I'm just a comedian with a Wi-Fi connection. Please let me know. If I got anything wrong, please drop a comment. I'm sure it'll be productive to someone. I read all of them on YouTube and Spotify. But even if I miss it, someone else will enjoy it. And if I don't get back to you, I'm sure it'll spark an interesting conversation that'll be useful for all the truth seekers of the world. Additionally, if you like religious content, great news. We have religion camp. That's where we deep dive in everything that everyone believes. And if you like crazy deep dives on the modern mysteries and conspiracies and myths and stories and the unsolved, we'll great news. Camp Gagnon is the place for you. And if you just like to deal with history viable, you're in the right spot. At History Camp, we do these episodes every single Wednesday. So make sure you comment, like, subscribe, all of that good stuff. We also have a secret society called patreon.com/campgagnon. Where you get every episode of this show completely ad-free. You also get merged discounts. You also are going to get episodes that never got to the public. And you're going to get monthly zooms with me and the rest of the squad. So make sure you check out the secret society over at patreon.com. And with all that out the way, I think we basically hit everything, Cresto. So this is a wonderful day that I got to spend with you and the rest of the rest of the good people here at the campsite. It was great. Anything else that we missed, Cresto? So I feel like I feel like we covered everything. I had a great day with you and the person watching right now. Turns out that males are more caring of children. Yeah, that's a good point. Let the record show. People always give credits to the moms. Actually, dads are taking care of their kids as evidenced by Pompey or perhaps he was an enslaved babysitter and was forced to do it and died holding this child, which is potentially sad. But regardless, justice for the dads. Anyway, thank you all so much for tuning in. I appreciate you dearly. This has been another episode of History Camp and I'll see you in the future to talk about the past. Hey guys, if you love conspiracies and hypothetical history, well, I want to invite you to check out Signal 33. This is a companion pod to our podcast here at camp. It's made and edited by the same team that runs all of our shows and I choose the topics every single week. So check it out, subscribe and start the dialogue in the comment section.